1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a medical image processing apparatus and a medical image processing method, and more particularly, to a medical image processing apparatus and a medical image processing method capable of detecting a raised shape in a three-dimensional model of body tissues inside the body cavity.
2. Description of the Related Art
An endoscope system configured by including an endoscope, a medical image processing apparatus, and the like is widely used in the medical field and other fields. Specifically, for example, the endoscope system is configured by including: an endoscope including an insertion portion to be inserted into the body cavity as a living body, an objective optical system arranged at a distal end portion of the insertion portion, and an image pickup section that picks up an image inside the body cavity formed by the objective optical system and outputs the image as an image pickup signal; and a medical image processing apparatus that executes a processing of displaying an image inside the body cavity on a monitor or the like as a displaying section based on the image pickup signal. A user, for example, observes an organ or the like as a subject inside the body cavity based on the image inside the body cavity displayed on the monitor or the like as the displaying section.
Having the above described configuration, the endoscope system can also pick up an image of for example, digestive tract mucosa of large intestine or the like as a subject inside the body cavity. Therefore, the user can comprehensively observe various findings such as color tone of mucosa, shape of lesion, and a fine structure of mucosal surface.
Furthermore, in recent years, an endoscope apparatus such as the one described in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Publication No. 11-337845 has been proposed, which is capable of generating a three-dimensional model of a subject based on two-dimensional image data corresponding to an image pickup signal of an image of the subject picked up by the endoscope.
Meanwhile, a method described in US Patent Application Publication No. 2003/0223627 has been proposed as a method for detecting a lesion site such as polyps in a three-dimensional model. The method enables to detect a lesion site in the three-dimensional model by evaluating the shape of the three-dimensional model using a feature value of shape, such as ShapeIndex and Curvedness, on the basis of curvature.